sourceType:: article author:: jaron lanier sourcePublication:: the atlantic ref:: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/05/how-to-fix-twitter-social-media/629951/ noteTitle:: how to fix twitter - and all of social media; jaron lanier. (article)
how to fix twitter - and all of social media; jaron lanier. (article)
Rather than content moderation or full free-speech thunderdome: allow posting only from groups of freely-associated users; no individual accounts can post.
post through groups’ “brand”
as micro-lending went through growing pains, people realized that lending to groups produced better loan repayment. people behave better when the responsibility is distributed and shared. social accountability.
members share both the good and bad consequences.
get together with people you feel comfortable with, trust, know. work together to create a brand.
must be small enough to know each other well enough to take on the meaningful pursuit of quality. (low hundreds of members, maybe even low dozens.)
when bad people and bad ideas inevitably emerge, they’ll be clearly labelled (by themselves, their own branding) and won’t be confused with ambient social perception. easier to psychologically compartmentalize the bad stuff, rather than it mixing in with the ambient feeds. (oh, that’s the nazi magazine posting. rather than lots of random people saying nazi things.)
it requires individuals to post less often - to get off the hamster wheel - in order to keep some level of attention that the attention economy sort of demands. when the responsibility of keeping the brand’s output going is shared by more people, any given individual can slow down, can think and create quality content - while still allowing the brand to succeed as a whole in this attention space.
since fellow members pay a price for your potential bad behavior, they’ll act to help keep you in line. It’s not great to have your friends chastising you, but it’s better than all the more coercive alternatives we’ve yet hit on for reducing maliciousness in society.
divvy up the rewards among members. like tech company bonuses. allow members a minimum sustainability in life. this also helps keep bots down: you don’t want part of your share disappearing into a bot hole that doesn’t create value.
hasn’t been tried yet, might not work. worth testing out.